Let Them Eat Cake - nibbling away precariously
You have heard that famously unhappy sentiment, allegedly spoken by Marie Antoinette about the starving poor of 1700s France. It justified her execution.
But have you heard the more erudite version?
‘The only thing the poor have to worry about is finding their next meal.’
Purposefully contentious and derided as propaganda, no civic-minded person would readily agree with this.
Yet this also holds a painful truth - that a life that relies on socialising is psychically precarious. And my youth suffered from my family's precarity.
Family life for me in 1980s Britain was decidedly broken, eating beans on toast most meals, relying on a father mostly absent, first with emotions, then with money, and soon in being. Those extended family who could help us would ignore our plight, still do. Now I have money, they venture more towards us.
School was difficult, a place without passion. Pointlessly institutionalised, the teachers showed zero interest in the things that I might like. Writing was merely plentiful techniques that an examiner could idly mark - no technique, no tick. Science was about percentages in exams and copying diagrams from textbooks - no questions, no wonder.
School social times were punctuated by flare-ups of violence. Most conversations coalesced on that which lived immediately in front of my face. Life was small and still.
Then one summer the school gave me running. Such races were the only thing in which I could be passionate about in public. My happy memory, like all powerful memories, is beyond easy narrative.
My running was intense. I ran the 400m flat out from the start, a copper-tinged taste in my mouth, young lungs pushing passed preset capacities, such pain temporary, yet actual and real. Trying hard now worked. In running I had found a fate that did not rely upon the vagaries of others.
When running, the derision of violent peers melted into physical admiration.
When running, the teachers became happy with the success I brought.
When running, Forrest Gump lived true.
Even now the sense of fresh cut grass awakens that first recognition of passion, of the chance to be beyond myself, of beating out the angst of that black and white town, of living the first kind of recognisable expression.
Like all potent memories, it makes me realise the simple pleasure of something that exists beyond measurement, away from awards, money, or even livelihood. It is a sense of when my youth became less precarious, away from the nibbling uncertainty of a limited life.
Happiest days ever (repost)
Ten fingers,
ten toes
two eyes
and a nose
healthy cry
tiny feet
little mouth
with which to eat
No happier in life
will I ever be
than this moment,
she thought lovingly.
Some years later
she finds she was wrong
listening as accolades
of her son are sung –
No happier in life
will I ever be
than this moment,
she thought lovingly.
Then, one day
she hears him interviewed
he praises his dad’s diligence
and his mom’s kindness, too –
heart bursting with pride
and joy at his words
filled with delight
for the views that she’s heard
No happier in life
will I ever be
than this moment,
she thought lovingly…
Perhaps this is it
the “happiest” days are behind
the beautiful memories
just shadows in her mind;
she’s still hopeful the burdens and sorrows to come
won’t obscure the joys of the past;
the key will be to remember with fondness not sadness,
to make the essence of the happiest days ever last.
In my eyes
Could you see it in my eyes?
A love partly desperate, eager
Elated in finding a place to go
Like the sun flooding through parting clouds
Finding the green tops of mountains high.
I’m sure it was coming from my eyes
Adoration in effect
When I think back I see the scene in gold;
Your hair and skin
My arms in jacket sleeves
Linked around your neck.
Let me think no more
And keep this memory just like so
I want to leave it like that
I’m sure you remember too
I’m sure you could see it in my eyes.
The Salt and the Sea
Sea-kissed salted smiles at dusk
that collided with teeth in clumsy affections
with a faraway gaze of northern lights
encapsulated on another.
Swells of sunflower love and
uncontrollable laughter rescinded,
and began again, erupting despite the assurance
they would get their breath together.
Seagulls that called out to Posideon
oversaw the pruned hands interloped
whose hearts soared far above
and felt that freedom.